Archive for June 2010

The USA never seems to learn the perils of empire: inflation,unemployment at home (Defense spending creates few jobs) and maybe most of all—a culture of death.

Read it and weep.

The Center for Defense Information notes that the 2008 official budget for military spending was drastically understated and that the real figure was over 900 billion dollars when all war expenses were included. Rounded off, what that means is that this nation, which cannot decide whether basic health care is a human right, is spending on kill-power:

Sam my great Italian barber had the World Cup blazing on TV as he clipped away.

I left the shop and many cars were festooned with flags and the CBC replaced hockey, hockey, hockey with World Cup news.

And oh those anxious nail biters at the games and France having a meltdown.

Are we supposed to care?

The more power citizens lose as active democratic agents, the more power as corporations control the air waves, the less power the average citizen feels. And so spectator sports, in this case low level tribalism fills the gap—momentarily—until hockey can begin again.Or some other diversion.

And Toronto with its lousy sports teams gives us so little to cheer about much less to identify with.

Theodore Herzl the driving force behind Zionism wrote in his private diary in 1895:”We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying employment for it in our country… the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumpspectly…”

But there were a people already there in “our countrty.” Today we call them Palestinians. This of course bothered ethical Jews like Asher Ginsberg and his disciple Isaac Epstein.

Ginsberg (pen name Ahd Ha’am) wrote:

‘We tend to believe that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, an uncultivated wilderness, and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow.’

Epstein settled in Palestine in 1886. Twenty years later he warned his fellow Zionists that: ‘there resides in our treasured land an entire people which has clung to it for hundreds of years… the Arab, like all other men, is strongly attached to his homeland.’’

A decade earlier in 1898 two rabbis from Vienna who visited Palestine in 1898, the year after the First Zionist Congress put it best ‘‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”

It appears Canada is getting as politically correct as the US on Israel.Winess the huffing and puffing over the remarks of BC NDPer Libby Davies. The usual nonsense came out of Steve Harper’s mouth but the Lib spokesman jumped all over Davies.

Libby Davies suggested that the occupation of Palestinian territories began in 1948, the year of Israel’s independence and also expressed her personal support for a campaign to boycott and sanction the country.

And quick to the PC charge was Bob Rae,the Libs foreign affairs critic.

“These are not the off-the-cuff ramblings of any ill-informed or biased person.Ms. Davies is the deputy leader of a political party that aspires to reflect and represent the views of Canada on the international stage. In this role, fully cognizant of her responsibilities, she stated that Israel has been occupying territories since 1948, the year of its independence. The logical implication of these comments is that Israel has no right to exist.

Hmm.I don’t see that leap in logic.

I do see the fact of the Occupation.

Of course Rae did not state his own bias. His wife Arlene Perly is Jewish and Rae has a longtime aversion to mentioning any Palestinian suffering.

Closer to the mark was Larry Haiven of independent Jewish Voices, “What’s next? Will Canadian politicians have to take a loyalty oath to the State of Israel in order to hold office? The feeding frenzy is outrageous. Libby Davies is one the bravest and most honest politicians in Canada. She has done more for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians than any other Canadian politician. ”

Poor Israel once again shoots itself—almost through the head in the latest overkill off the coast of Gaza.Condemned by virtually everybody except,of course the Canadian Harper government and the Americans.

For so long the powertful lobby group AIPAC has held the US Congress by the short and curlies, descending on any politician who would dare criticize Israel.

Now of course the tide has turned and the world has awakened to the cruel Occupation of the Palestinian people…yet America can had hardly utter a word of condemnation.

Ariel Sharon, a lifelong antisemite, Arab variant (Read Baruch Kimmerling’s Politicide: Areile Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians) in a moment of brutal candour spoke of this on Israeli radio.

He described the embarrassing hold Israel had on the United States when appearing with Shimon Peres on Oct.3,2001. He said, “Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”

Corporations aree committed to the market economy.They have the same opposition to any national or international government regulation. They are especially resistant to any restraints on their activities based on protection of the environment…They have corrupted the government.They have devastated the naturakl endowment of the North American continent.”

Thomas Berry The Great Work

A post Pentecost Sunday today, the feast of the Body and blood and the oil continues to gush out into God’s Body, the sacred waters and earth.

Think of all the Mel Gibson like meaningless sermons will be preached in churches today. Dead heads looking back to the blood on the Cross missing the crucifixion of the Body today.

Oil addiction in the country which is the most “Christian” of all, people who comprise less than 4% of the earth consuming 25% of the world’s resources and oil.

And a smart enough president saying that he before this catastrophe was set to drill again really believing that the BPs of our lives don’t cut corners to maximize profits. Drill baby, drill. Let the market rule.Corporations know what they are doing.Get governments off our backs.